| Anarcho-Syndicalist Review |
Spring 2000
The author is a former Lithuanian dissident who was exiled from the Soviet Union and quickly found himself shilling for the Republicans. Ten years later, Anelauskas now recognizes that for most people the "American Dream" is relentless struggle merely to survive. After a personal, but not very engaging, introduction titled "My Journey to the Land of Misery and Plutocracy," he serves up a series of fact-filled, thoroughly documented, horryfying statistics and anecdotes about economic inequality, massive (and spreading) poverty, starving children, failing schools, devastated families, third world housing, crime, slave labor for the poor, socialism for the rich, and the emerging new world order. (He lays the responsibility for these problems squarely at the door of capitalism, where it belongs.) It is a bleak portrait, and a useful one in that most Americans take for granted many of the conditions that strikes Anelauskas (who has known other societies) as most outrageous and depraved. At the same time, it is a bit of a grab bag. Anelauskas is fed-up, and rightly so, with the hypocrisy of American rhetoric, and with the wretched misery in which hundreds of thousands of Americans are compelled to live. He refuses to believe that a society built on oppression and force can long survive. His vision seems to be a social democratic one, in which government ensures the right to a decent job, health care, education, housing and social security. But it is not at all clear how he would have us get there.
by Jon Bekken
-
|
-
|
|
|
|